Secrets
by Hawkeye Girl
Summary: It's not okay if it's a secret. Booth's introspective foray. Oneshot.


**Author's Note:** Special thanks to David K., an attorney, colleague, and friend as well as a former Ranger, who also believes that it's never okay if it's a secret.

**Disclaimer:** If you saw my checkbook balance, you'd know I own absolutely nothing.

**Rating:** K, whatever that's supposed to mean. Can't we just go with PG-13?

**Spoilers:** Soldier in the Grave. Booth's comment 'it's never okay if it's a secret' hit me hard, and it prompted me to ask my co-worker, the aforementioned David K., about his days as a Ranger. I got more than I bargained for, and it made me realize that all of us who ask them to share are helping hands in their personal darkness.

Happy Birthday David Boreanaz! This one's for you, cutie!

Secrets.

That's what life is all about when you're in the military. Everything you've done, everything you're about to do, is never given a voice. You receive your orders, you carry them out, and bury the knowledge in the recesses of your soul, never again to see the light of day.

That's what you're told from day one in Special Forces training. When you are deployed, no one can be told where you are or why you are going. You are a Ranger, the leader, and compromising even the slightest information could very well be the death of the troops to follow.

Name, rank, and serial number. Nothing more can ever be uttered. Hold your secrets to the grave.

But they never tell you what a secret really is. What it really does to you.

You know that you're killing the killers. You are preventing a death, foiling a murder plot, halting a potential genocide. What you are doing is right and just.

But a secret is poison. Every time you pull that trigger, every time a body falls, it swirls in your blood. You can't expel it. You can't tell anyone.

So the secret remains; the poison remains. And slowly, it starts to kill you.

You don't even notice at first, really. Sure, it's hard to know you've taken a life. But you remind yourself that you prevented hundreds more. You ignore the weight that seems to be bearing down on your chest. You swallow the lump in your throat. And you move on.

You keep following your orders. You continue to protect the world from evils they will never know. You never speak a word of it to anyone. And the poison continues to seep through your body unchecked. It has nowhere else to go.

Then your tour of duty ends. No more slaying dragons of evil, just back to mundane life. Be at work by nine, fight rush hour traffic, find something for dinner, do laundry, clean the house.

Like that's even possible. The poison has spread too far to ever live that kind of life again.

But you pretend, because there isn't another option. You joke with colleagues, you pull out the charm smile to get your way, you smirk when it works. You go to a club and dance, you take your son to the park, you go out on a date with a gorgeous woman.

But when you sleep, your mind won't let you pretend. Gunshots echo through your dreams, you hear screams through a haze of red, and rivers of blood wash your soul. You killed in the name of justice, but it doesn't matter. You snuffed out a life. Somewhere, sometime, this vile excuse of humanity had a mother, a child, someone who loved him. And you wake in a pool of your own sweat, and you know that your own blood is tainted.

But it's a secret. You can't tell it, you can't purge it. You are as condemned as those you eliminated.

Suddenly, in the darkness of your heart, you find a hand grasping for yours. As you sit in a field of the fallen, surrounded by the white marble markers, she's reaching for you. "Tell me," she says.

It isn't okay if it's a secret. But maybe it doesn't have to be one any longer. Maybe there is an antidote to the poison circulating in your psyche.

They said you can't tell. Name, rank and serial number only. But they didn't tell you the secrets would kill you.

You're tired of dying this slow, tortured death. You want to live.

"We all die a little bit, Bones," you say. And you tell her. Everything. She's reaching for you, and you grab on to her as if your life depended on it.

Maybe it does.

Will it be enough? Will telling her put an end to the dreams, the guilt? Will you be able to breathe again someday?

You don't know. But it's not okay if it's a secret. And she's listening now, keeping you here with her. You know she'll always listen to your secrets, always be there to help cleanse the poison from your veins.

You squeeze her hand a little tighter, and you know it will be okay.

It's not a secret anymore.

Please review! This is my first foray into Bones fic, please tell me if I suck or not.


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